Here’s your Adventure Wednesdays Photo Challenge: 1 item, 20 ways. Try it and you may expand how you see solutions to life’s issues.

Conflict Resolution

In grammar school they are teaching my 6-year-old niece how to problem solve using the symbolism of a traffic light. Red = stop whatever you are having a problem with Yellow = look at the problem and find at least 6 different solutions and Green = pick one solution and try it.

Native Americans have a practice called Rule of Six. When faced with an event or something that is challenging or what we may call a problem, it is required to come up with six possible theories. By creating these different perspectives, the solutions may be different than if you went with your first reaction. Taking the expanded viewpoint, the solution chosen may be more appropriate, more effective and the wiser choice.

Photo Lessons

I love photography and travel. It was a dream for many years to be a travel photographer for Conde Nast’s Travel magazine. The closest I came was working for a trade magazine for professional photographers early in my career. I know enough about photography to know I don’t want to learn the technical parts of it (aperture? Umm…yeah, that’s important I think. Ha!)  With the recent innovations with phone cameras, my old point & shoot has been booted to the back of the closet.

In a recent “how to make money from travel photography” email I receive, they mention a tip I know well – take shots of common places from different angles. The point being, the typical post card shot has been done, and new perspectives are more interesting and more likely to sell. In this particular email, they said try getting 20 different shots.

This made me think. Like adventures, photography isn’t always about exotic locales. So I decided to make this challenge my own. To take an everyday item and photograph it 20 different ways.

Conflict resolution + Photography =

Although the traffic light and Rule of Six practices state using six theories, I went with the higher 20. Why? My Adventures have taught me to look at things from different perspectives and six seemed easy. Granted, I still have times when I’m in the middle of an emotional issue and seeing things from other people’s perspectives isn’t exactly easy.  I’m guessing this is why in conflict resolution they probably go with six! Much easier to do than 20. For my challenge, I went with photographing an orange. Since I connected in my head the conflict resolution practice with the photo challenge, my first thought was to make a stop light type image – maybe by painting the oranges. Here are some select ones I did actually take:

I was inspired to create many expressions using cloves and the orange. At one point I had clove eye brows…which really changed the feeling of the face. I like this one as it seems like a guy telling a joke.

I was playing with the display at the supermarket, putting a lemon in with the oranges. My intention was to create the metaphor of odd man out. The colors of the oranges are almost too close to the lemon in this shot to truly have strong impact. I like this visual enough I may try again…and hopefully the staff at the grocery store won’t yell at me

This one I enjoyed participating with – meaning I was doing research for my hot chocolate tour, and this particular drink had orange rind as flavor and decoration. Yum!

When you focus on something, it seems as if you suddenly see it everywhere. At a Pret a Manger restaurant, they had several styled photos using oranges. So, I admit, I cheated by taking a photo of a photo of oranges. Maybe someday I’ll take a photo that has this much effort put into it!

Getting close and personal. This view almost looks like it could be Mama Gena inspired (look up her latest book! Inspiring, even with it’s unusual title)

I was posting on Instagram so many photos of oranges, a friend made a comment referencing the old “knock knock” jokes. So this is for him. “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” (insert grade school laughter here)

This is the last shot I took in my series. Orange rinds in my compost being covered in snow. To me, it’s a “Circle of Life” kind of statement.

Conflict resolution + photography = lessons learned

They say new habits are best learned by repetition. After photographing an orange 20 times, in different ways, the image of the orange stays in my head when I think of conflict resolution. It takes repetition to learn the lessons of thinking of at least six theories. I remember helping my niece learn the school lesson when she was having a challenging moment over the holidays by repeating the teacher’s instructions. Her shift in perspective was amazing to watch. Last weekend, while overtired and grouchy, I started to create a problem with my partner. Somehow, that image of an orange popped into my head. I shifted my perspective and let go of the issue. I opened up to the possibilities of other theories.

Take the Adventure Wednesdays Photo Challenge!

Your turn! Take an item, or a place (exotic or not), or a person if you desire. Take your camera or your camera phone. Discover 20 different ways to photograph it. Use different lighting. Interact with it. Participate with it. Change it. Look to what others have done to photograph it, and see if you can mimic it. Keep in your mind the Rule of Six and expand your theories. In photography, there’s a “Rule of thirds” which is about composition within the frame. Play with that.

Let me know your results! Post it on Instagram (use the #adventurewednesdays and tag me @adventurewednesdays so I can see your images). Tell me in the comments anything you learned/felt/enjoyed/hated about the project.